(Update: Thank you to Karen Lynch for featuring “It All Begins with Self-Love” in the Live the Power Blog Carnival - Volume 12, and welcome to all readers from Live the Power!)

A dear friend recently emailed me for some help and advice on making the Law of Attraction work for her. This year has been a year of serious personal challenges for her, mostly around love and relationships, and she was having a hard time feeling good about anything in her life.

I told her to forget about focusing on feeling good.

Making the conscious decision to reach for the thought that will make you feel better is a very good starting point. But for me, the one practice that has helped the most has been focusing on loving myself more.

The thing is, you can be feeling good, but still hold a lot of negative thoughts about yourself. Feeling good does not equal self-love.

But when you move towards loving yourself unconditionally, feeling good is a natural and inevitable by-product.

Making the Law of Attraction work for you begins with learning to love yourself.

Why the Practice of Self-love and Self-appreciation?

When your self-worth depends on what other people think of you, you’re giving control over how you feel to external forces. And if you do that, it doesn’t matter what your situation is - you could be living in the lap of luxury, loved by everyone around you, but if you measure your worth by how other people outside of you measure your worth, you would still be in the same precarious situation.

The thing is, you do have full control over all of this - right down to you choosing to hand over your power to other people.

The Powerful Tool of Self-Love

The practice of self-love is a very powerful tool that will steer you in the right direction. By practicing self-love and self-appreciation, you learn to love yourself so much you refuse to give even the energy of thought to someone who thinks negatively about you.

When you do this, you WILL find that your life is filled with those who love and appreciate you. And you will be open to seeing them.

So instead of trying to just feel good, make loving yourself your main priority. You’ll feel good doing this anyway, so forget about concentrating on “feeling good” and make everything be about “I’m really amazing.”.

Catch That Negative Self-Talk … And Turn It Around

Set an intention to catch all the negative self-talk you have about YOU. Every time you catch yourself thinking, “what a stupid thing I just said” or “that was so dumb of me, why did I do that?”, recognize it for what it is - negative self-talk of no substance. You can change all of this, and the more you do it, the easier it gets.

So if you find yourself thinking, “what a stupid thing I just did”, work on making your very first reaction be “but hey, people do stupid things all the time, and I’m a pretty amazing person so who really cares?”.

A la Abe: Who Gives a Rip?

It’s really about getting to the point where you can truly say, “I don’t really care what anyone else thinks”. “Who gives a rip?” is a good mantra. It’s one that Abraham-Hicks stresses, and it works.

When you’re able to let go of worrying about what other people think about you, you’ll find a freedom to BE yourself, and once you start feeling that freedom, you’re set to soar. Truly.

“I Am Absolutely Wonderful.”

As you begin the practice of learning to love yourself unconditionally, try this: Lay it on thick. Remind yourself, often, how amazing you are. Keep doing it, even when you’re blushing and thinking, “how on earth can I go around thinking thoughts like that about ME? About how wonderful I am? How nauseating - if I had to listen to someone else talk like that about herself, I’d throw up!”

Even when those thoughts come up, ignore them. Lay on those compliments. The whole purpose is to shift your focus and after years and years of being down on yourself and beating yourself up, you really do have to lay it on thick with the self-compliments to get away from that negative self-perspective.

So keep doing it, and after a while, you will find that you can say to someone, “You know what? I’m pretty fabulous” and it won’t feel odd or funny at all. It will simply be true.

Loving Who You Are, All of You

I’m not talking about narcissism here. This isn’t about feeling you’re perfect, or superior. It’s not about holding every one else in contempt, or seeing them as being beneath you.

There is no such thing as perfection - not the way we normally think of that term, anyway. And what you are learning to do is to love yourself unconditionally - warts and all. Eventually you’ll get to that place where all of your imperfections are wonderful because they make you who you are.

When you begin the journey towards loving yourself unconditionally, you’ll also find that loving others unconditionally comes more easily.

You Never Get It Wrong

Forget the past. Forget all the blunders and mistakes you feel you’ve made. Forget about blame and fault. Even though we are in these physical bodies, we are so much more than just that. We ARE the energy that makes up the Universe.

You are divine, and you can’t create wrong. Everything you created, you created for a reason. You created it all to get you to where you are right now, and so it must be good. You are poised to take off, to truly become who you are, and you wouldn’t have been able to get to this space and time in your life if it weren’t for everything you’ve gone through.

This is where you must be strong - you must be strong for you. You must do everything that you do because you love yourself way too much to do anything else.

Simply Start Now

There really is just one thing you can do about this, and that’s start right now. And keep doing it. And keep doing it. Keep doing it until it’s as natural as breathing to acknowledge to yourself what an amazing person you are.

You see, this is your greatest power. Once you get there, because it is ALL internal to you, nothing that I can say or anyone else can say will topple you from your connection with the beauty and grace of your spiritual self. Because that’s who you’re learning to love right now.

Who you are is about much more than this physical body. You are spirit made physical. And you ALWAYS have that connection to your Soulself. Always. Even when you don’t feel it, that connection exists. It’s just that you’ve likely had years of being taught to ignore this connection with who you are.

So take a deep breath, and start learning to love yourself unconditionally today.